It is always fun to write about price reductions. I enjoy knowing that our customers will find AWS to be an even better value over time as we work on their behalf to make AWS more and more cost-effective over time. If you've been reading this blog for an extended period of time you know that we reduce prices on our services from time to time, and today’s announcement serves as the 42nd price reduction since 2008.

We're more than happy to continue this tradition with our latest price reduction.

Amazon EC2 Price ReductionsWe are reducing prices for On-Demand instance as shown below. Note that these changes will automatically be applied to your AWS bill with no additional action required on your part.

Instance Type

Linux / Unix Price Reduction

Microsoft Windows Price Reduction

M1, M2, C1

10-40%

7-35%

C3

30%

19%

M3

38%

24-27%

We are reducing the prices for Reserved Instances as well for all new purchases. With today’s announcement, you can save up to 45% with on a 1 year RI and 60% on a 3 year RI relative to the On-Demand price. Here are the details:

Instance Type

Linux / Unix Price Reduction

Microsoft Windows Price Reduction

1 Year

3 Year

1 Year

3 Year

M1, M2, C1

10%-40%

10%-40%

Up to 23%

Up to 20%

C3

30%

30%

Up to 16%

Up to 13%

M3

30%

30%

Up to 18%

Up to 15%

Also keep in mind that as you scale your footprint of EC2 Reserved Instances, that you will benefit from the Reserved Instance volume discount tiers, increasing your overall discount over On-Demand by up to 68%.

Amazon S3 Price ReductionsWe are reducing prices for Standard and Reduced Redundancy Storage, by an average of 51%. The price reductions in the individual S3 pricing tiers range from 36% to 65%, as follows:

Tier

New S3 Price / GB / Month

Price Reduction

0-1 TB

$0.0300

65%

1-50 TB

$0.0295

61%

50-500 TB

$0.0290

52%

500-1000 TB

$0.0285

48%

1000-5000 TB

$0.0280

45%

5000 TB or More

$0.0275

36%

These prices are for the US Standard Region; consult the S3 Price Reduction page for more information on pricing in the other AWS Regions.

Amazon RDS Price ReductionsWe are reducing prices for Amazon RDS DB Instances by an average of 28%. There's more information on the RDS Price Reduction page, including pricing for Reserved Instances and Multi-AZ deployments of Amazon RDS.

Amazon ElastiCache Price ReductionsWe are reducing prices for Amazon ElasticCache cache nodes by an average of 34%. Check out the ElastiCache Price Reduction page for more information.

Amazon Elastic MapReduce Price ReductionsWe are reducing prices for Elastic MapReduce by 27% to 61%. Note that this is addition to the EC2 price reductions described above. Here are the details:

Instance Type

EMR Price Before Change

New EMR Price

Reduction

m1.small

$0.015

$0.011

27%

m1.medium

$0.03

$0.022

27%

m1.large

$0.06

$0.044

27%

m1.xlarge

$0.12

$0.088

27%

cc2.8xlarge

$0.50

$0.270

46%

cg1.4xlarge

$0.42

$0.270

36%

m2.xlarge

$0.09

$0.062

32%

m2.2xlarge

$0.21

$0.123

41%

m2.4xlarge

$0.42

$0.246

41%

hs1.8xlarge

$0.69

$0.270

61%

hi1.4xlarge

$0.47

$0.270

43%

With this price reduction, you can now run a large Hadoop cluster using the hs1.8xlarge instance for less than $1000 per Terabyte per year (this includes both the EC2 and the Elastic MapReduce costs).

We've often talked about the benefits that AWS's scale and focus creates for our customers. Our ability to lower prices again now is an example of this principle at work.

It might be useful for you to remember that an added advantage of using AWS services such as Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 over using your own on-premises solution is that with AWS, the price reductions that we regularly roll out apply not only to any new storage that you might add but also to the existing data that you have already stored in AWS. With no action on your part, your cost to store existing data goes down over time.

Once again, all of these price reductions go in to effect on April 1, 2014 and will be applied automatically.

Several additional features are now available for newly launched M3 instances.

Prices for S3 storage have been reduced by up to 22%.

Prices for EBS Standard volume storage and I/O operations have been reduced by up to 50%.

Let's take a closer look!

M3 Instance Type NewsWe announced the M3 instance type a little over a year ago. Our customers and our partners have found them to be very attractive. For example, a wide variety of top software is available to run on M3, with offerings such as aiScaler, Syncsort, Riak, NITRC available with 1-click deployment on AWS Marketplace

The M3 is our Second Generation General-purpose EC2 instance type. They have a balance of CPU power, RAM, and networking capacity that is suitable for a very wide variety of applications. Today we are making the M3 instance type even more useful, with support for two new instance sizes and some new features.

New Instance SizesWe are adding medium and large M3 instances. Here's the full lineup:

When compared to the venerable M1 instance type, the M3 instances offer higher clock frequencies, significantly improved memory performance, and SSD-based instance storage, all at a lower price. If you are currently using M1 instances, switching to M3 instances will provide your users with better and more consistent performance while also decreasing your AWS bill. We reduced the prices for the M3 instances late last year and they are now more cost-effective than the M1 instances.

SSD-Based StorageAs you can see from the table above, the M3's now include fast, SSD-based instance storage. You can add instance storage for M3 instances by specifying block device mappings in the instance launch parameters.

Instance Store-Backed AMIsM3 instances have always supported launching from EBS-backed AMIs. They now support the use of instance store-backed AMIs (previously known as S3-backed AMIs) as well. This will allow you to make use of older AMIs that have not been converted to the newer, EBS-backed format. To learn more about the two types of AMIs, read the EC2 Root Volume documentation.

The new sizes and features are available in all of the public AWS Regions. They are not yet available in AWS GovCloud (US); however, the original M3 instance sizes (m3.xlarge and m3.2xlarge) are already available in GovCloud.

S3 Price ReductionWe are reducing the price for Amazon S3 storage in all Regions by up to 22%, with a proportionate reduction in the price of Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS). Here are the new prices for Standard Storage in the US Standard Region (see the New S3 Pricing page for more information):

Tier

Old Price (/GB/Month)

New Price (/GB/Month)

Change

0-1TB

$0.095

$0.085

-11%

1-50TB

$0.080

$0.075

-6%

50-500TB

$0.070

$0.060

-14%

500-1000TB

$0.065

$0.055

-15%

1000-5000TB

$0.060

$0.051

-15%

5000TB+

$0.055

$0.043

-22%

The new pricing take effect on February 1, 2014 and will be applied automatically.

EBS Price ReductionWe are reducing prices for Elastic Block Store (EBS) Standard volume storage and I/O requests across all AWS Regions. The reductions vary by Region, and are as high as 50% in some locations. Here's the new pricing in the US East (Northern Virginia) Region:

EBS Standard Volumes

Old Price

New Price

Change

GB-Month of Provisioned Storage

$0.10

$0.05

-50%

1 Million I/O Requests

$0.10

$0.05

-50%

Again, the new pricing takes effect on February 1, 2014 and will be applied automatically. See the New EBS Pricing page for additional information.

I am happy to announce a reduction in the On Demand and Reserved Instance (RI) prices for EC2's HI1 (First Generation High I/O Performance) instances in select AWS regions, effective December 1, 2013, along with availability in the form of Spot Instances

The HI1 instances feature 16 vCPUs (Virtual CPUs), 60.5 GiB of RAM, 2 TB of SSD-backed instance storage, and 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity, including support for cluster placement groups. You can learn more about them in the blog post that I wrote when we launched this instance type late last year.

Price ReductionThe On Demand prices for Linux and Windows instances have been reduced by 10% for HI1 instances in EU (Ireland) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo).This change takes effect on December 1, 2013.

We are also reducing Reserved Instance (RI) pricing for HI1 - Linux and Windows instances by 10% for HI1 instances in EU (Ireland) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo). New Reserved Instance prices will only apply to Reserved Instances purchases made on or after December 1.

Spot Instances You can now bid for HI1 instances on the Spot market in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions.

Launched in 2011, Dedicated Instances run on hardware dedicated to a single customer account. They are ideal for workloads where corporate policies or
industry regulations dictate physical isolation from instances run by
other customers at the host hardware level.

Like our multi-tenant EC2
instances, Dedicated Instances let you take full advantage of On-Demand and
Reserved Instance purchasing options. Today’s price drop continues the AWS
tradition of innovating to reduce costs and passing on the savings to our
customers. This reduction applies to both the dedicated per region fee and the
per-instance On-Demand and Reserved Instance fee across all supported instance
types and all AWS Regions. Here are the details:

Dedicated Per Region Fee – An 80% price reduction from $10 per hour to $2 per hour in any Region where at least one Dedicated Instance of any type is running.

Dedicated On-Demand Instances – A reduction of up to 37% in hourly costs. For example the price of an m1.xlarge Dedicated Instance in the US East (Northern Virginia) Region will drop from $0.840 per hour to $0.528 per hour.

Dedicated Reserved Instances – A reduction of up to 57% on the Reserved Instance upfront fee and the hourly instance usage fee. Dedicated Reserved Instances also provide additional savings of up to 65% compared to Dedicated On-Demand instances.

These changes are effective July 1, 2013 and will automatically be reflected in your AWS charges.

To launch a Dedicated Instance via the AWS Management Console, simply choose a target VPC and select the Dedicated Tenancy option when you configure your instance. You can also create a Dedicated VPC to ensure that all instances launched within it are Dedicated Instances.

To learn more about Dedicated Instances and to see a complete list of prices, please visit the Dedicated Instances page.

I'm happy to announce that we are lowering the price of Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) database instances, both On-Demand and Reserved.

On-Demand prices have been reduced as much as 18% for MySQL
and Oracle BYOL (Bring Your Own License) and 28% for SQL Server BYOL. All of your On-Demand usage will automatically be charged at the new and lower rates effective June 1, 2013.

Reserved Instance prices have been reduced as much as 27% for MySQL and Oracle BYOL. The new prices apply to Reserved Instance purchases made on or after June 11, 2013.

Here is a table to illustrate the total cost of ownership for an m2.xlarge DB Instance for MySQL or Oracle BYOL using a 3-year Reserved Instance:

Region

Old Price

New Price

Savings

US East (Northern Virginia)

$4,441

$3,507

21%

US West (Northern California)

$6,044

$4,410

27%

US West (Oregon)

$4,441

$3,507

21%

AWS GovCloud (US)

$4,835

$4,217

13%

Although Reserved Instance purchases are non-refundable, we are making a special exception for 1-year RI's purchased in the last 30 days and 3-year RI's purchased in the last 90 days. For a limited time, you can exchange recently purchased RI's for new ones. You'll receive a pro-rata refund of the upfront fees that you paid at purchase time. If you would like to exchange an RDS Reserved Instance for a new one, simply contact us.

As you may know from my recent blog post, we have made a lot of progress since releasing Amazon RDS just 3.5 years ago. In addition to the recently announced Service Level Agreement (SLA) for Multi-AZ database instances, you have the ability to provision up to 30,000 IOPS for demanding production workloads, encryption at rest using Oracle's Transparent Data Encryption, and simple disaster recovery using Multi-AZ and read replicas.

I'm happy to announce a price reduction of up to
26% on Windows On-Demand instances. This price drop continues the AWS tradition
of exploring ways to reduce costs and passing the savings along to you. This reduction applies to the
Standard (m1), Second-Generation Standard (m3), High-Memory (m2),
and High-CPU (c1) instance families. All prices are effective from April
1, 2013. The size of the reduction varies by instance family and region. You can visit the AWS Windows page for
more information about Windows pricing on AWS.

Members of the AWS team will be attending and staffing our booth at the Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas. If you want to learn more about AWS and how to build, deploy, and monitor your Microsoft Windows Server instances, be sure to stop by booth #733. The team is also hosting an invitation-only customer session. If you are attending the conference and would like to receive an invitation, simply complete this survey!

We're making Amazon DynamoDB an even better value today, with a price reduction and a new reserved capacity pricing model.

Behind the scenes, we've worked hard to make this happen. We have fine-tuned our storage and our processing model, optimized our replication pipeline, and taken advantage of our scale to drive down our hardware costs.

You get all of the benefits of DynamoDB - redundant, SSD-backed storage, high availabilty, and the ability to quickly and easily create tables that can scale to handle trillions of requests per year. To learn more about how we did this, check out Werner's post.

DynamoDB Price ReductionWe are reducing the prices for Provisioned Throughput Capacity (reads and writes) by 35% and Indexed Storage by 75% in all AWS Regions. Here's a handy chart:

Provisioned Throughput(per hour per 10 write units or 50 read units)

Indexed Storage(per GB/month)

Region

Old Price

New Price

Old Price

New Price

US East (Northern Virginia)

$0.0100

$0.00650

$1.00

$0.250

US West (Northern California)

$0.0112

$0.00725

$1.12

$0.280

US West (Oregon)

$0.0100

$0.00650

$1.00

$0.250

Europe (Ireland)

$0.0113

$0.00735

$1.13

$0.283

Asia Pacific (Singapore)

$0.0114

$0.00740

$1.14

$0.285

Asia Pacific (Tokyo)

$0.0120

$0.00780

$1.12

$0.300

Asia Pacific (Sydney)

$0.0114

$0.00740

$1.14

$0.285

South America (São Paulo)

$0.0150

$0.00975

$1.50

$0.375

AWS GovCloud (US)

$0.0120

$0.00780

$1.20

$0.300

This reduction takes effect on March 1, 2013 and will be applied automatically.

DynamoDB Reserved CapacityIf you are able to predict your need for DynamoDB read and write throughput within a given AWS Region, you can save even more money with our new Reserved Capacity pricing model.

You can now buy DynamoDB Reserved Capacity. If you need at least 5,000 read or write capacity units over a one or three year time period you can now enjoy savings that range from 54% to 77% when computed using the newly reduced On-Demand pricing described in the previous section. The net reduction with respect to the original pricing works out to be 85%.

If you purchase DynamoDB Reserved Capacity for a particular AWS Region, it will apply to all of your DynamoDB tables in the Region. For example, if you have a read-heavy application, you might purchase 20,000 read capacity units and 10,000 write capacity units. Once you have done this, you can use that capacity to provision tables as desired, for the duration of the reservation.

To purchase DynamoDB Reserved Capacity, go to the DynamoDB console, fill out the Reserved Capacity form (click on the button labeled "Purchase Reserved Capacity"), and we'll take care of the rest. Later this year we'll simplify the purchasing process, add additional Reserved Capacity options, and give you the ability to make purchases using tools and APIs.

DynamoDB ResourcesIf you would like to learn more about DynamoDB, you can watch the following sessions from AWS re:Invent:

DynamoDB and RedshiftAmazon Redshift is a fast, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service. You might want to start thinking about interesting ways to combine the two services. You could use DynamoDB to store incoming data as it arrives at "wire" speed, do some filtering and processing, and then copy it over to Redshift for warehousing and deep analytics.

You can copy an entire DynamoDB table into Redshift with a single command:

The AWS team is always exploring ways to reduce costs and to pass the savings along to our customers. We're more than happy to continue this tradition with our latest price reduction.

Starting today, we are reducing prices for new EC2 Reserved Instances running Linux/UNIX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server by up to 27%. This reduction applies to the Standard (m1), Second-Generation Standard (m3), High-Memory (m2), and High-CPU (c1) instance families. As always, if you reserve more, you will save more. To be more specific, you will automatically receive additional savings when you have more than $250,000 in active upfront Reserved Instance fees.

With this price reduction, Reserved Instances will provide savings of up to 65% in comparison to On-Demand instances. Here are the price decreases by instance family and Region:

Price Decrease (%)

Region

m1

m2

m3

c1

US East (Northern Virginia)

13.0%

23.2%

13.2%

10.1%

US West (Northern California)

13.3%

27.7%

13.3%

10.0%

US West (Oregon)

13.0%

23.2%

13.2%

10.1%

AWS GovCloud (US)

0.6%

13.9%

1.1%

2.1%

Europe (Ireland)

13.3%

27.7%

13.5%

10.0%

Asia Pacific (Singapore)

4.9%

19.8%

4.9%

2.4%

Asia Pacific (Tokyo)

4.9%

20.8%

5.0%

2.2%

Asia Pacific (Sydney)

4.9%

19.8%

4.9%

2.4%

South America (São Paulo)

4.9%

21.1%

4.9%

0.0%

These new prices apply to all three Reserved Instance models (Light, Medium, and Heavy Utilization) for purchases made on or after March 5, 2013.

We recommend that you review your usage once a month to determine if you should alter your Reserved Instance footprint by buying additional Reserved Instances or selling them on the AWS Reserved Instance Marketplace. However, if you haven’t done it lately, now is the perfect opportunity to review your existing usage and determine if now is the right time to purchase new Reserved Instances. Here are some general guidelines to help you choose the most economical model:

If your server is running less than 15% of the time, use an On-Demand instance.

If your server is runninng 15% and 40% of the time, use a Light Utlization Reserved Instance.

If your server is running 40% to 80% of the time, use a Medium Utilization Reserved Instance.

If your server is running 80% to 100% of the time, use a Heavy Utilization Reserved Instance.

During the month of March, you can take advantage of a free trial of AWS Trusted Advisor to generate a personalized report on how you can optimize your bill by taking advantage of the new, lower Reserved Instance prices. For more information about Trusted Advisor, see my post about the AWS Trusted Advisor Update + Free Trial.

Over time, we've optimized our own systems in order to make SNS and SQS available to even more customers. The goal has always been to charge less for processing the same volume of messages. We did this with the SQS Batch API in 2011 and more recently with long polling for SQS and 64KB payloads for SNS.

Today we are making SQS and SNS an even better value:

SQS API prices will decrease by 50%, to $0.50 per million API requests.

SNS API prices will decrease by 17%, to $0.50 per million API requests.

The SQS and SNS free tiers will each expand to 1 million free API requests per month, up 10x from 100K requests per month.

The new prices take effect on March 1, 2013 and are applicable in all AWS Regions with the exception of the AWS GovCloud (US).

If you'd like to learn more about SQS and SNS, check out this video from AWS re:Invent:

-- Jeff (with lots of help from Jon Turow, Senior Product Manager for SQS and SNS);